College students who major in the humanities always get asked a certain question.

Theyre
asked it so oftenand by so many peoplethat it should come printed on their diplomas.
That question, posed by friends, career counselors, and family, is What are you planning to do
with your degree? But it might as well be What are the humanities good for?

According to three new books, the answer is Quite a lot. From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon,
people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle todays biggest social and
technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human contextsomething
humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do. Call it the revenge of the film, history,
and philosophy nerds.

In The Fuzzy and the Techie, venture capitalist Scott Hartley takes aim at the false dichotomy
between the humanities and computer science. Some tech industry leaders have proclaimed
that studying anything besides the STEM fields is a mistake if you want a job in the digital
economy. Heres a typical dictum, from Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla: Little of
the material taught in Liberal Arts programs today is relevant to the future.

Hartley believes that this STEM-only mindset is all wrong. The main problem is that it
encourages students to approach their education vocationallyto think just in terms of the
jobs theyre preparing for. But the barriers to entry for technical roles are dropping. Many
tasks that once required specialized training can now be done with simple tools and the
internet. For example, a novice programmer can get a project off the ground with chunks of
code from GitHub and help from Stack Overflow.

If we want to prepare students to solve large-scale human problems, Hartley argues, we must
push them to widen, not narrow, their education and interests. He ticks off a long list of
successful tech leaders who hold degrees in the humanities. To mention just a few CEOs:
Stewart Butterfield, Slack, philosophy; Jack Ma, Alibaba, English; Susan Wojcicki, YouTube,
history and literature; Brian Chesky, Airbnb, fine arts. Of course, we need technical experts,
Hartley says, but we also need people who grasp the whys and hows of human behavior.

What matters now is not the skills you have but how you think. Can you ask the right
questions? Do you know what problem youre trying to solve in the first place? Hartley argues
for a true liberal arts educationone that includes both hard sciences and softer subjects.
A well-rounded learning experience, he says, opens people up to new opportunities and helps
them develop products that respond to real human needs.

The human context is also the focus of Cents and Sensibility, by Gary Saul Morson and Morton
Schapiro, professors of the humanities and economics, respectively, at Northwestern
University. They argue that when economic models fall short, they do so for want of human
understanding. Economics tends to ignore three things: cultures effect on decision making,
the usefulness of stories in explaining peoples actions, and ethical considerations. People
dont exist in a vacuum, and treating them as if they do is both reductive and potentially
harmful.

Morson and Schapiros solution is literature. They suggest that economists could gain wisdom
from reading great novelists, who have a deeper insight into people than social scientists do.
Whereas economists tend to treat people as abstractions, novelists dig into the specifics. To
illustrate the point, Morson and Schapiro ask, When has a scientists model or case study
drawn a person as vividly as Tolstoy drew Anna Karenina?

Novels can also help us develop empathy. Stories, after all, steep us in characters lives, forcing
us to see the world as other people do. (Morson and Schapiro add that although many fields of
study tell their practitioners to empathize, only literature offers practice in doing it.)

Sensemaking, by strategy consultant Christian Madsbjerg, picks up the thread from Morson
and Schapiro and carries it back to Hartley. Madsbjerg argues that unless companies take pains
to understand the human beings represented in their data sets, they risk losing touch with the
markets theyre serving. He says the deep cultural knowledge businesses need comes not from
numbers-driven market research but from a humanities-driven study of texts, languages, and
people.

Madsbjerg cites Lincoln, Fords luxury brand, which just a few years ago lagged so far behind
BMW and Mercedes that the company nearly killed it off. Executives knew that becoming
competitive again would mean selling more cars outside the United States, especially in China,
the next big luxury market. So they began to carefully examine how customers around the
world experience, not just drive, cars. Over the course of a year, Lincoln representatives talked
to customers about their daily lives and what luxury meant to them. They discovered that in
many countries transportation isnt drivers top priority: Cars are instead seen as social spaces
or places to entertain business clients. Though well engineered, Lincolns needed to be
reconceived to address the customers human context. Subsequent design efforts have paid
off: In 2016 sales in China tripled.

What these three books converge on is the idea that choosing a field of study is less important
than finding ways to expand our thinking, an idea echoed by yet another set of new releases: A
Practical Education, by business professor Randall Stross, and You Can Do Anything, by
journalist George Anders. STEM students can care about human beings, just as English majors
(including this one, who started college studying computer science) can investigate things
scientifically. We should be careful not to let interdisciplinary jockeying make us cling to what
we know best. Everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer, as the saying goes.
Similarly, at how great a disadvantage might we put ourselvesand the worldif we force our
minds to approach all problems the same way?